Beyond Victimhood and Resistance

<p class="ql-align-justify">This study analyzes Bai Fengxi’s <em>First Bathed in Moonlight</em>, a post-Mao Chinese play, through Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory framework. While trauma narratives in women’s literature often depict women as victims or resisters within the unfolding of traumatic memory, this research highlights their multiple and shifting identities. Using qualitative narrative analysis and coding, the article illustrates how traumatic experiences are narrated, recalled, and transmitted across generations, and how the multiplicity of women’s identities and roles in the process conveys specific gender ideologies. The findings demonstrate that female characters are not confined to binary roles but occupy a broader, fluid spectrum that includes perpetrators, rescuers, and bystanders, in addition to victims. A key finding is that the drama positions trauma not as individual misfortune but as a manifestation of systemic oppression arising from an interplay of economic structures, social conventions, educational deprivation, and familial discipline. Furthermore, the study articulates a dual path to healing: self-redemption, achieved by reinterpreting traumatic memory, and redemption by others, which the play links to social and political hierarchies and the possession of structural power. Through its inclusive narrative stance and empathetic treatment of female characters, the play creates space for collective witnessing and foregrounds the interconnectedness of women’s experiences. By focusing on a dramatic text, this research sheds light on a form of literary expression often overlooked in scholarship on Asian women’s literature and demonstrates the applicability of the postmemory framework to post-Mao Chinese drama, contributing new insights into the intersections of gender, trauma, and cultural memory.</p>